


Jump, John Watson

by orphan_account



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Angst, Depression, Gen, More angst
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-07-02
Updated: 2011-07-02
Packaged: 2017-10-20 23:22:06
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 681
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/218216
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account





	Jump, John Watson

John feels the physical embodiment of the moment you retire to your bedroom at six o'clock in the evening and feel you may as well just go to sleep, nothing else good will happen, you won't achieve anything and _no one is going to call_.

Normally that moment coincides with the realisation that John Watson is sad. Not mopey, not miserable: _sad_. The sort of indistinct sadness of a child at a funeral of a distant relative, aware that they are unhappy but unable to fathom why.

If he were a doctor he would diagnose this sadness but he is not a doctor; he is a fraud. He is a painting of a broken man who acts his woes and silent tribulations but is not real and does not live them. Just because he walks and talks and respires does not mean he is alive.

That’s what he’s trying to be. He’s trying to be alive.

He has an eye that twitches, sometimes; a leg that aches with a phantom pain, that holds memories of injuries never inflicted upon it. An elbow that clicks whenever he extends and rotates it: the movement one makes when twisting a doorknob, for example. It clicks without fail every time he completes the motion – clockwise or anticlockwise, it never seems fussy – and he has learned to tolerate it while the sound unnerves others. He has fingers that seem to attract paper-cuts and hangnails, the most minor yet somehow most irritating of grievances.

John Watson has a bullet wound in his left shoulder. The skin feels ruptured, sometimes like a violent sea when he feels poetic or a ruined city after an earthquake when he feels pathetic. There are bumps and fissures where the skin ought to be smooth and he still feels violated by stitches long removed as the wound healed over.

Jumpers are the comfort he takes from the most unforgiving of worlds; stating it like that seems farcical but then again most times the truth is. They hide just enough. Warm, just enough. A brother without a sister must find a substitute somewhere.

They didn't have to love each other. John could have tolerated the sibling rivalry or jealousy or hatred or something, anything but the indifference and the ceasing of contact. It was just never an issue, never a problem, never something to devote time to. Family. Perhaps she thought they would always be there or perhaps she hoped the very opposite; John doesn't know now and probably won't ever, but there's no comfort in the realisation that she's more fucked up that he could ever be. Only envy. Envy that Harriet can exist unperturbed yet deeply disturbed while he must play out his existence haunted by a past he can never recapture and a longing for danger so potent it scares him every time he wakes up in the morning. So strong that he's not above jumping into the path of an oncoming car just to feel the rush. He hasn't yet but he could and isn't that worse?

It is always worse.

John Watson closes his eyes because he has nothing left to lose. When he opens them it will be the morning of the rest of his life, a beginning of something new and ridiculous and so brilliant he won't be able to restrain himself from uttering it out loud, out of sheer disbelief, out of elation. He will scare himself, hate himself as usual; he will take a trip to Russell Square simply to fill another day and collide paths with an old University friend. This friend will lead him back, back through a regression that bypasses the wounds he earned, right back to the dawn of his adult existence. There he will meet Sherlock Holmes and change his future forever.

After that day, John has no time for trips up to his bedroom to lie with eyes open on his mattress, feeling sorry for himself. Only time to believe that this man – this beautiful, preposterous, flawed man – may just be the perfect insalubrious antidote to his existence.


End file.
